An English-Polish Glossary of Lexicographical Terms
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An English-Polish Glossary of Lexicographical Terms: A Description of the Compilation Process Mirosława Podhajecka University of Opole Monika Bielińska University of Silesia In the present paper we describe the consecutive phases in the compilation of an English-Polish glossary of lexicographical terms, which is part of a larger dictionary project-still in the making. In doing so, we address some of the issues that made the compilation procedure methodologically difficult. On theoretical grounds, the main dilemma was whether lexicographical-i.e. mainly descriptive-or terminological/terminographical-i.e. mainly prescriptive-principles should be followed, inasmuch as they result in different coverage, organisation and description of data. The most pertinent practical problem that we faced was, on the one hand, the variability of terms in English lexicographical discourse and, on the other one, the incompatibility of English and Polish terminological frameworks. It was therefore envisaged that, for the glossary to be used successfully in text reception, allowing alternative terms and determining various levels of equivalence between interlingual terms would be a necessity. The issues discussed here have been illustrated with selected English-Polish contrastive material. 1. Introduction Many language faculties at Polish universities offer regular courses in lexicography and lexicology, but despite the development of lexicography as an academic discipline, specialist dictionaries describing its (meta)language have not been available on the Polish market. Encyclopedias and dictionaries of linguistics or its subdisciplines like applied linguistics (e.g. Szulc 1997, Lukszyn 1998, Polański 1999) do not, as a rule, pay much attention to lexicographical concepts, and foreign-language dictionaries of lexicography (e.g. Bergenholtz, Cantell et al. 1997, Burkhanov 1998, Hartmann and James 2001) have not received wide recognition in Poland, primarily because of the language barrier. A reference work published in Polish would thus reach a potentially wide audience. Such a dictionary, created by a team of researchers from five Polish universities, is now nearing completion. The dictionary is based on Polish, German, English, French and Russian literature on lexicography, lexicology and semantics. Because of this multilingual approach, it has been complemented by four bilingual glossaries (English-Polish, German-Polish, French-Polish and Russian-Polish). The present paper addresses the main issues involved in the compilation of the English-Polish glossary, which is the first fully-fledged attempt to contrast the terminological and conceptual frameworks of English and Polish lexicography. As such, it turned out to be a project at the crossroads of lexicography and terminology/terminography, with problems of both theoretical and practical nature. Following a brief introduction of the whole dictionary, the paper describes the consecutive steps taken by the authors in the compilation procedure, i.e. the planning phase, the collection of material, the selection of data, and the construction and arrangement of entries (cf. Hartmann 2001: 14-20), tackling the methodological problems that were faced en route. 2. Dictionary description 2.1. Target users The dictionary is addressed primarily to students and scholars at Polish language faculties, who will be able to use it both for research as well as for didactic purposes. Another important group of target users are linguists carrying out contrastive analyses (Polish-English, English-Polish; Polish-German, German-Polish, etc.), translators and professional lexicographers. In other words, the dictionary is 1041 Mirosława Podhajecka, Monika Bielińska intended for semi-experts and experts rather than laypersons (cf. Bowker 2003: 157), because it requires from its users at least literacy in linguistics. Consequently, terms designating the most rudimentary linguistic concepts, e.g. fleksja “inflection”, morfem derywacyjny “derivational morpheme” or część mowy “part of speech”, have not been included into the dictionary term list. 2.2. Background conception As has been mentioned, apart from Polish, the dictionary describes the major European (i.e. English, German, French and Russian) lexicographical “landscapes”. The team of compilers was selected according to this criterion. There are two arguments for including foreign dictionary-making traditions. Firstly, each of the traditions has had some unique achievements, so the target user will gain a comprehensive overview of lexicography as a subject field. Secondly, contrasting different (meta)languages helped us to discover both similarities and differences between them, which directly fostered the compilation of bilingual glossaries. 2.3. Dictionary structure The dictionary, describing over 600 Polish terms (plus the cross-referenced ones), consists of the front matter, macrostructure, or “dictionary proper”, and back matter with the four bilingual glossaries. The term list is organised on a strictly alphabetical principle. As the dictionary can be used for a single look-up and for more integrated tasks, in which the target user searches for broader information, what plays an important role is a rich cross-referencing structure allowing the user to identify the whole conceptual network associated with the terms that s/he is interested in. The dictionary microstructure is composed of an entry term, its etymology (if known), alternative Polish terms, a definition, additional explanations and illustrative examples. Then come equivalent foreign terms, followed by a multilingual bibliography. 2.4. External and internal selection The dictionary macrostructure is by no means exhaustive, but all the concepts that are essential in (meta)lexicographical discourse have been classified and treated in detail (cf. Bielińska 2005a, 2005b). One can find core terms in it, such as słownik “dictionary”, leksykografia “lexicography”, hasło “entry”, kultura słownikowa “dictionary culture”; entries describing different dictionary genres; types of definitions, labels and lexicographical errors; components of macro- and microstructure; as well as entries describing e-dictionaries, corpora and software tools indispensable in a lexicographer’s workbench. Several terminological innovations, e.g. struktura dostępu “access structure”, część ramowa “frame structure”, ślepy odsyłacz “blind reference” or elementy pozahasłowe części zasadniczej “middle matter”, have also been proposed to fill conceptual gaps. The new terms are marked with the letter N (= neologism), so that the user could distinguish them among traditional elements of Polish terminology. 2.5. Form of publication The dictionary will appear in print for handy use in classrooms and library reading rooms. At the same time, however, we are planning the publication of the dictionary online, via the Silesian Digital Library (Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa), linked with other digital libraries in Poland. In the future, we intend to make the dictionary available on an Internet platform, which facilitates the use of hypertext features of electronic publications. In this way, we will be able to easily update the dictionary, include more extensive bibliography and add links to online dictionaries, corpora and full-text articles. Moreover, as the dictionary back matter will include some non-textual content, i.e. images of old and rare dictionaries, the quality of the visual display is expected to be much better. We believe that the transition from the paper to the electronic medium is indispensable for such dynamically developing fields as (meta)lexicography and specialised lexicography. 3. Compiling the English-Polish glossary 3.1. The planning phase The glossary is a dependent bilingual component of a monolingual dictionary, hence certain decisions had to be made as to its organising principles, design features and future applications. As the glossary is based on a reversed Polish (the source language, or SL) term list, it was expected that the 1042 Section 5. Lexicography for Specialised Languages - Terminology and Terminography compilation process would consist primarily in selecting equivalent English (the target language, or TL) terms, that is both single terms (e.g. definition) and multi-word terms (e.g. ostensive definition). As the user can find detailed information about SL terms in the monolingual entries, the glossary does not have TL definitions or contextual illustrations. At the same time, however, we wanted to somehow point to intra- and interlingual relationships between the included terms, so that the target group could fully efficiently use the glossary in the reception of specialist TL texts. 3.2. The collection of material Compilers of terminological dictionaries rely either on term banks or domain-specific texts to ensure the maximum reliability of their products. As lexicographical term banks do not exists, and the available mono- and multilingual resources, including the encyclopedia edited by Hausmann et al. (1989-91), would be insufficient for Polish-English and English-Polish contrastive goals, it was necessary to create an exemplary corpus (cf. Martin and van der Vliet 2003: 340). For this purpose, specialist texts in Polish and in English were collected, but the corpus had two drawbacks. Firstly, the textual resources were fairly disproportionate in quantity. In other words, while we had a relatively representative subcorpus of Polish lexicographical writing, providing “adequate coverage” of the TL field (Bowker